Internet Archive Digital Library Update 7/6/20

While it defends itself against a lawsuit launched by 4 publishers aiming to stifle a long-standing practice, the Internet Archive and its Open Library continues to evolve, as noted in a release from yesterday:

Premier Religious School Donates Quarter of a Million Volumes to Internet Archive. Scholars will soon have online access to 250,000 research volumes from a premier theological school, thanks to a donation from the Claremont School of Theology. Strengths of the collection include Comparative Theology and Philosophy, Feminist Theology, and Afro-Carribean spirituality. In addition to the 250,000 volumes, the library is donating its Ancient Biblical Manuscripts Collection, the world’s largest collection of images of ancient religious (Jewish and Christian, biblical and extra-biblical) manuscripts. Digitizing these collections will take significant time and resources, but will provide access to materials that, in many cases, have never been published online. If you’d like to support this effort and you have the ability to do so, please consider donating.

Two Major Library Groups Join Chorus of Support for Controlled Digital Lending. Last week, two major library organizations affirmed their commitment to the longstanding and widespread library practice of digitizing physical books they own and lending out secured digital versions. Please join ARL, SPARC, and hundreds of libraries and librarians that support controlled digital lending by endorsing the position statement on controlled digital lending.

Libraries Are Updating for Today’s Digital Needs. Congress Needs to Clear the Way. John Bergmayer, Legal Director for Public Knowledge, has penned an essay urging Congress to “clarify that libraries should be as free to buy and lend books today as they have been for centuries.”

 Commercial Textbooks Present Challenges in a Virtual Environment. As an example of the issues described by Bergmayer above, University of Guelph Library has released a statement describing the challenges for libraries in meeting the needs of an online student body for Fall 2020. The lack of ebooks for textbooks disadvantages students—did you know that approximately 85% of existing course textbooks are unavailable to libraries in any format other than print?

The National Emergency Library is Dead and Controlled Digital Lending May be Next. Regarding the current lawsuit filed by publishers, Daniel Takash writes in The Captured Economy, "Most–if not all–of the arguments made with respect to the Open Library’s harms to publishers’ bottom lines can be made just as forcefully against traditional libraries."

Sign Up for New Webinars in July: How Controlled Digital Lending Works for Libraries. Join Chris Freeland, Director of Open Libraries at Internet Archive, for a new series of webinars outlining how controlled digital lending works. Sessions are scheduled through the end of July.

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